Nothing could better have illuminated the depths of this horrible life than to see how far one of its creatures may go in madness and yet emerge from it, marvelling at the Torpedo’s violent ecstasy at the knees of this priest. The poor wench gazed at the order of her release with an expression which Dante forgot, surpassing the inventions of his Inferno. But with tears came the reaction. Esther rose to her feet, threw her arms about this man’s neck, placed her head on his bosom, wept on it, kissed the rough material which covered the heart of steel, and seemed bent on penetrating it. She laid hold of the man, covered his hands with kisses; in a holy effusion of gratitude, yet wheedled him with caresses, lavished fond names upon him, among the honeyed phrases said to him again and again: ‘Give it to me!’ with as many varied intonations; enfolded him in tenderness, covered him in glances so rapid they should have laid him defenceless; in the end, numbed his anger. The priest saw how this woman had come by her nickname; he understood how difficult it was to resist the enchanting creature, he all at once unriddled Lucien’s love and the charm which had caused it. Such a passion, among its many attractions, conceals a barbed sharpness which hooks especially the lofty souls of poets and artists. Inexplicable to the crowd, such passions are fully explained by that thirst for ideal beauty which is characteristic of creative natures. To purify such a being, is it not to be a bit like the angels charged with leading the guilty back to nobler feelings, is it not to create? What a temptation to bring moral and physical beauty into consonance! What pride in one’s joy if one succeeds! What a fair task which needs no instrument but love! Unions of that kind, illustrated moreover by the examples of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Cethegus, Pompey, yet monstrous in the eyes of the vulgar, are based on that feeling which led Louis XIV to build Versailles, which has always thrown men into ruinous undertakings : to convert the miasma of a swamp into heaped-up scents surrounded by living water; to put a lake on a hill-top, as the Prince of Conti did at Nointel, or the views of Switzerland at Cassan, like Farmer General Bergeret. In the last resort, it is the irruption of Art into Morality.

The priest, ashamed of yielding to tenderness, sharply repulsed Esther, who sat down, herself ashamed, for what he said to her was: ‘You are still a whore.’ And coldly he tucked the letter back in his girdle. Like a child with only one thought in her head, Esther could not take her eyes off that place at his waist where the paper was.

The rat becomes a Mary Magdalene

‘DAUGHTER,’ the priest continued after a pause, ‘your mother was a Jewess, and you were not baptised, but neither were you taken to the synagogue: your place is in the religious Limbo to which little children go…’

‘Little children!’ she repeated softly.

‘… Just as in Police files, you are a mere number, without social identity,’ went on the implacable priest. ‘If love, appearing to you as a runaway, made you suppose, three months ago, that you were reborn, you must feel that since that day you have been truly in a state of childhood. You must therefore conduct yourself like a child; you must change utterly, and I take it upon myself to put you beyond recognition. In the first place, you will forget Lucien.’

The poor girl was heartbroken at this thought; she raised her eyes towards the priest and shook her head; she could not speak, finding that the supposed rescuer was still to be her executioner.

‘You will at least stop seeing him,’ said the priest. ‘I shall take you to a religious house where the daughters of the best families receive their education; there you will become a Catholic, you will be instructed in Christian practices, you will be taught religion; you could leave that place a girl with accomplishments, chaste, pure, well-bred, if…’

He held up a finger and paused.

‘If,’ he went on, ‘you feel that you have the strength to leave the Torpedo here.’

‘Ah!’ cried the poor child to whom each word had been like a note of music at the sound of which the gates of paradise were slowly opened, ‘Ah, if it were possible to pour out all my blood here and to receive new blood!…’

‘Listen to me.’

She was silent.

‘Your future depends on your power to forget. Think of the extent of your obligations: one word, one gesture which betrayed the Torpedo kills Lucien’s wife; something you said in a dream, an involuntary thought, an immodest look, a sign of impatience, a memory of past dissolution, an omission, a movement of the head which revealed what you know or what to your misfortune has been known…’

‘Believe me, Father, believe me,’ the girl said with the exaltation of a saint, ‘to walk in shoes of red-hot iron and to smile, to live wrapped in a spiked corset and preserve the grace of a dancer, eat bread sprinkled with ashes, drink wormwood, it would all be easy, sweet!’

She fell on her knees again, she kissed the priest’s shoes, made them wet with her tears, she clasped his legs and pressed her face against them, murmuring senseless words as she wept for joy. Her admirable fair hair hung to the ground and made a carpet beneath the feet of this messenger from heaven, whom she saw hard-faced, unsmiling, when she stood up and looked at him.

‘What offence have I given you?’ said she in fear again. ‘I have heard tell of a woman like me who poured aromatic ointment upon the feet of Jesus Christ. Alas, virtue has made me so poor that I have only tears to offer!’

‘Did you not hear me?’ he answered in a voice of cruelty. ‘I tell you, you must be able to leave the house where I am taking you so changed in your nature and appearance that neither man nor woman among those who knew you will be able to call out to you: “Esther!” and make you turn your head. Yesterday, love had not given you the strength so deeply to bury the woman of pleasure that she should never reappear, she appears again in this adoration which belongs only to God.’

‘Did He not send you to me?’ said she.

‘If, during the course of your education, you caught sight of Lucien, all would be lost,’ he continued. ‘Think well of that.’

‘Who will console him?’ she said.

‘For what did you console him?’ asked the priest in a voice which, for the first time in this scene, betrayed a nervous tremor.

‘I don’t know, he was often sad when he came.’

‘Sad?’ the priest asked again. ‘Did he tell you why?’

‘Never,’ she replied.

‘He was sad at being in love with a woman like you,’ cried he.

‘Alas, he was right to be sad!’ she continued with deep humility. ‘I am the most despicable creature of my sex, and I could only find favour in his eyes by the strength of my love.’

‘That love must give you the courage to obey me blindly. If I led you at once to the house where you will be educated, everybody here would tell Lucien that you had gone away, today Sunday, with a priest; that would put him on your path. In a week from now, the caretaker, not seeing me come back, will have taken me for what I am not. So, one evening, say today week, at seven o’ clock, you will go out secretly and enter a cab which will be waiting for you at the end of the rue des Frondeurs. Avoid Lucien all week; find excuses, have him forbidden the door, and, when he comes, go upstairs to a friend’s room; I shall know whether you’ve seen him, and, in that case, everything is over, I shan’t even return. You’ll need a week to put some respectable clothes together and stop looking like a prostitute,’ he said putting a purse on the mantelpiece. ‘There is in your manner, your clothes, that something so well known to Parisians which tells them what you are.